Wye Oak’s video for “The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs” was released today and it’s a very cinematic video shot by Dan Huiting in the desert landscape of New Mexico’s White Sands National Monument.

The band sums it up best: “We went to the desert. It might seem hot, but it was actually cold. What is the point of all this? You’ll never outrun yourself. The past is always at your heels.”

For ‘The Louder…’, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack flew to one another’s cities—she in Durham, North Carolina, he in Marfa, Texas—for a week or so at a time, hunkering in home studios to sort through and combine their separate song sketches. These shorter stints together produced less second-guessing and hesitation in their process, yielding an unabashed and unapologetic Wye Oak. They discarded past rules about how to write a record, instead funneling all those experiences and experiments into perfectly unified statements.

The result is some of the biggest, broadest and boldest music Wye Oak has ever made. ‘The Louder…’ pursues a litany of modern malaises, each of its dozen tracks diligently addressing a new conflict and pinning it against walls of sound, with the song’s subject and shape inextricably and ingeniously linked. It arrives at a time of immense doubt, when our personal problems are infinitely compounded by a world that seems in existential peril. But these songs answer the challenge by radiating self-reflection and resolve, wielding hooks and musical intricacy as a shield against the madness of the moment.

‘The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs’ will be out worldwide on April 6; pre-orders are available today on CD and “sand & sky” (opaque beige & translucent blue) Peak Vinyl in the Merge store with an optional exclusive t-shirt bundle. The album is also available to pre-order via these participating independent record shops or from these digital providers.

‘The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs’ track list:
1. (tuning)
2. The Instrument
3. The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs (YouTube)
4. Lifer
5. It Was Not Natural
6. Symmetry
7. My Signal
8. Say Hello
9. Over and Over
10. You Of All People
11. Join
12. I Knot It’s Real

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Greg started Culture Fiend as a way to discuss the many facets of pop culture. Greg usually surrounds himself with Star Wars action figures, Legos and a healthy supply of interesting films and unusual records.